“The Hawk” has seen a lot of baseball in his time.
Baseball fans of a certain age remember Ken Harrelson’s signing with the Boston Red Sox at the end of August during the 1967 MLB season, and seeing New England’s newest, favorite son being a force during the “Impossible Dream” American League pennant run as if it was still unfolding.
His persona was even larger than his contributions during the 23 games that the Fenway Park faithful adopted him as one of their own. His monstrous follow-up full-season of 1968 solidified Harrelson in the same reverence as hockey’s Bobby Orr and basketball’s Bill Russell in Boston.
The seasons suiting up in Cleveland, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C., were opening and closing acts for Harrelson. Being a Red Sox put “the Hawk” at the top of America’s landscape. Endorsements and appearances on radio and TV networks came at a steady stream. More than a half century later, Harrelson’s past remains well ahead of him with those who witnessed what they saw as the “coolest cat” of the turbulent 1960s.
At 83, today “the Hawk”—a nickname earned among his fellow players early on in his career due to an obviously pointed and elongated nose—enjoys living out a well earned retirement in Central Florida. His love for golf, on the same level if not slightly a smidge ahead of swinging a bat for nine MLB seasons, is mothballed.
“I haven’t played a round in five years,” Harrelson told The Epoch Times on Monday. “When I played ball, I swung a heavy bat (40 ounces). That wore my wrists out. Yesterday, I hit 10 balls and not one of them was solid. My wrists are achy today.”
As fast of a flash that Harrelson was THE draw of not only the baseball scene but all professional sports in the late 1960s, perhaps only equaled by his often late-night running partner “Broadway” Joe Namath, 52 games for the Cleveland Indians’ 1971 would be his exit from the game that made him a larger-than-life celebrity. Not yet 30, Harrelson walked away from baseball and took a shot at being a professional golfer. He was good, and at times very good, but baseball never stopped calling.
With all of his success in Boston, it would be on Chicago’s South Side where Harrelson’s legend would be watered for the rest of his career. The 2025 season of the White Sox is the organization’s 125th of their history.
For 33 seasons, and throw in a year as the club’s general manager, Harrelson was the club’s play-by-play broadcaster on both radio and TV. With a bevy of memories at what began at Comiskey Park and had ended when the naming rights were Guaranteed Rate Field, surprisingly, Harrelson doesn’t hesitate to point out his two favorite people he came across with the club.
Watching former White Sox Frank Thomas slug the majority of his 500-plus home runs on the South Side for 16 seasons, it was Harrelson who crowned him with a nickname that became synonymous with him all the way to his induction into the Hall of Fame—“The Big Hurt.”
“He (Thomas) was the best hitter I ever saw in the organization,” Harrelson declares. “We keep in touch.”
A friendship that traced back to the mid-1980’s, the other White Sox connection Harrelson speaks of is one of which he is most proud. Don Drysdale is a name that still, on this spring morning when reminiscing on the phone of their first coming together as broadcast mates from 1982 to 1987, brings pause to Harrelson’s voice.
“He (Drysdale) respected me, and I respected him,” proclaims Harrelson, who came to the White Sox booth after seven seasons calling Red Sox games. “I loved the guy like a brother.”
The inseparable duo remained close up to Drysdale’s death in 1993, who at the time was part of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ broadcast team.
“I learned so much about announcing from him. Don knew the game and its nuances better than anyone I had ever met. When he pitched for the Dodgers, Don was a two-for-one kind of guy,” explains Harrelson of Drysdale who in 1984 was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “If opposing pitchers hit a Dodgers’ batter, Don would hit two of theirs.”
While working side-by-side for five seasons in Chicago, Harrelson remembers learning of his close friend’s passing. His voice weakens when recalling that life-changing message.
“One of the White Sox owners came into our broadcast booth in-between innings, and informed me that Don had been found dead in his hotel room in Montreal. I remember having a few beers with him on the road one day, and Don said to me that he didn’t want to die someday in a hotel room,” he said.
The Dodgers were on the road playing the Expos, and when he didn’t show for the buses heading to the ballpark, the hotel checked Don’s room. He had suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of 56.
Living in a quiet community, far from his South Carolina roots and “Beantown” where the legend of “the Hawk” grew to heights unheard of at the time, Harrelson is content at being just one of the many residents enjoying a sunny retirement. In a lifetime where at each stage of his working days, he accelerated to levels where projections said otherwise—as a baseball player, hitting golf balls, and finally broadcasting that eventually landed him in Cooperstown as the 2020 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award that is presented annually by the Baseball Hall of Fame to a broadcaster for “major contributions to baseball”—Harrelson was a winner
Missing old friends, doling out nicknames by the handful to players who gladly accepted the new identities, and unabashedly rooting for “his” White Sox during broadcasts, decades of wins and losses to mentally rewatch, Harrelson has earned the anonymity he is afforded today.
